ALEX BRUMMER: As the net closes in on the BHS sharks we must not forget the real victims of this squalid affair

What a ghastly and unedifying mess. Watching the former BHS directors fighting it out like rats in a sack before a Parliamentary committee, with former chief executive Darren Topp alleging the firm’s owner Dominic Chappell threatened to kill him, makes the current popular Damian Lewis Billions box set look like tame stuff.

The investigating BIS and Pensions select committees have begun a process which is starting to parallel the 1970s Lonrho affair, the original ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’.

As the former directors squabble and three-times bankrupt Chappell seeks to blame BHS’s former proprietor Sir Philip Green for what has happened we shouldn’t at any point forget the real victims of this squalid affair.

Passing the buck: Three times bankrupt Dominic Chappell sought to blame former proprietor Sir Philip Green for the collapse of BHS as he was grilled in the Commons yesterday

Chappell and Green have been luxuriating on their yachts while 11,000 BHS workers are losing their livelihood (with the taxpayer picking up part of the redundancy bill) and some 21,000 members of the pension fund are facing severe cuts in their retirement income.

All of this before we consider the disastrous impact on suppliers and the high street.

The public evidence has been riveting with much more to come when the retail tycoon himself Green makes an appearance next Wednesday.

Book your seats now. The main questions for Green are likely to cluster around the £571million buy-out shortfall in the pension fund.

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The evidence so far suggests Green can also expect to face hostile questions over testimony that he never really let go of BHS.

There are allegations that in BHS’s dying days he actively lobbied potential buyers to pull back from a rescue.

Much of the personal testimony looks unreliable. Meanwhile, Olswang, the legal advisers to Chappell, are claiming confidentiality and privilege.

So the real answers to what happened almost certainly lie in the mountain of documents, emails, letters and other paperwork being accumulated by the committee and helpfully posted on its website. This is open government at its best.

It is also helpful that the MPs had the good sense to appoint a financial advisory group, headed by former City minister Lord Myners to sort through complex issues.

Myners helpfully has laid out the charge sheet in a Lords speech covered by Parliamentary privilege.

Among the sins he identified are potential fraudulent preference, creditor preference and appropriation of corporate assets under the direction of the directors of the company.

If Myners is right it could be time for the authorities to impound some passports, or risk a Asil Nadir-style flight to far off places.

Myners also has unfinished personal business with Green dating back to the battle of M&S in 2004.

He is calling on HMRC ‘to look into the ownership structure of (Green’s businesses) and how it managed to convince itself that these businesses are owned by Lady Green in tax-free Monaco but run by her husband from the UK’.

Green could take a great deal of venom out of the whole process if he made a ‘big’ and generous gesture to the BHS pension fund. But as the charges and allegations mount up that may no longer prove enough.

Giving tree

If Sir Martin Sorrell worked for himself his £70million pay package might seem acceptable.

After all there are footballers and entrepreneurs who are rewarded just as handsomely.

But he doesn’t. He is the chief executive of a very successful public company and year after year shareholders show disquiet about his remuneration and are ignored.

Each year we are told his targets have been rewritten and calmed, but somehow he has a contract which keeps on giving.

No one disputes Sorrell created a global giant which is big earner for creative Britain. He could not have done it without the City, which bailed him out in the 1990s. It has allowed him to boost income on a regular basis through bids and by using WPP paper.

Moreover, Sorrell runs a group where there are ethical conflicts. Should a media buying organisation also be a creative agency and a powerful PR vehicle? It is the kind of thing Vance Packard worried about when he wrote The Hidden Persuaders six decades ago.

All these are big questions which may have to be determined by a successor, now that we are assured that a process has begun.

Growth spurt

Where is George Osborne when you need him? He was out of the traps like a greyhound to warn of the dangers of Leave when Ed Conway of Sky reported ‘capital flight’ in March which saw £59billion flee the country.

The latest official data shows that the British industrial output grew at its fastest pace in April for four years at a healthy 2 per cent clip.

Meanwhile, The National Institute of Economic and Social Research estimated that over the last three months the economy grew at its best rate since January.

This despite the fact that the World Bank has lowered its global growth forecast from 2.9 per cent to 2.4 per cent.

Far from crashing, as Remain would like you to believe, the UK is doing very nicely thank you.